True Grit

It was snowing hard when I got up this morning, although it’s beginning to ease off now. Like many other people, I suspect, I find it strange that so many schools have been closed this week – I remember trudging through the snow to get to school when I was a kid.

In earlier times, people just got on with their lives, unless they physically couldn’t get out of their door because the snow was so high. The mail-coaches kept going even if snow was up to their horses’ bellies. There were reports of mail-guards and passengers riding outside the coaches freezing to death in severe weather. One of the bleakest nights on record during Georgian times was that of Friday 8 November 1799. Many mail-coaches got stuck in the snow. The mail guards had to leave their coaches behind and take the postbags on horseback to their destination.

Images: 'Taking up the mails,' and 'In a Snowdrift.' Hugh Thomson, Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, (Macmillan, 1910.)

Coaching Days

Coach journeys in Jane Austen’s time were perilous because of the terrible state of the roads: deep in mud, or full of vast ruts. The weather, too, caused lots of problems; passengers and coachmen sometimes froze to death in the deep midwinter. Austen makes frequent references to coach travel in her novels and letters. In a letter to Cassandra (25 April 1811) Jane wrote: ‘Eliza caught her cold on Sunday on our way to the D’Entraigues; the Horses actually gibbed on this side of Hyde Park Gate – a load of fresh gravel made it a formidable hill to them, and they refused the collar; I believe there was a sore shoulder to irritate. Eliza was frightened, & we got out - & were detained in the Evening air several minutes…’

Jane had a fun drive after visiting to a picture exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1813 (where she’d hoped to find a portrait of Mrs Darcy): ‘I had great amusement among the Pictures; & the Driving about, the Carriage being open, was very pleasant. I liked my solitary elegance very much, & was ready to laugh all the time, at my being where I was. I could not but feel that I had naturally small right to be parading about London in a Barouche.’
You can find out more about the thrills and spills of coach travel in my latest feature for Jane Austen's Regency World.

Images: The old White Horse Cellar Inn, near Arlington St. The final stop for passengers from the west, it’s possible Jane Austen got off the coach here when visiting London. Engraving by I.R. and G. Cruikshank, Life in London, Pierce Egan, (John Camden Totten, 1869.)
‘In a Snowdrift,’ engraving by Hugh Thomson, Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, (Macmillan, 1910.)